We got our first circuit board back from the PCB house and assembled it in our office a couple of weeks back. I've hand soldered a lot of boards but this was my first time using a stencil and a reflow oven. Johannes has made hundreds of PCBs this way though, so he showed me how... very fun! 

As for the board, welp, it didn't work. After an hour staring at the schematics and poking at the board with a multimeter we figured out that the culprit it was one unconnected ground trace! 

Once we figured out what was wrong it was an easy fix with an external wire. Result! The test light blinked on! We attached it to six solenoids and hooked it up to my computer, then ran an midi track I'd prepared earlier on Ableton.  

It totally worked! Woohoo! Next up: testing, revisions, testing, revisions...